THOMAS MORTON 373 was most commonly aimed at in pulpit oratory throughout the reign of James I. The question of the toleration of religious nonconformity was one which steadily occupied the thoughts of King James, and led to the production of an extraordinary amount of writing. Most of this was wholly ephemeral in form as in matter, but James employed in his controversies the ablest minds which he could command. Andrewes 66 was one of those who defended the King against Bellarmine and his other opponents on the continent of Europe whom his views on episcopacy and allegiance had stung into fury; but the controversial pamphlets of Andrewes were in Latin. Among those who warred with Rome in a ceaseless flow of English "apologies apologies" and. "incounters" and defences" and "replies " none was more active and none quite so vigorous as, in his youth, THOMAS MORTON, afterwards Bishop of Durham. The tracts poured forth by his indefatigable zeal against his Romish adversaries have the faults of the age, but occasionally overcome them, and when Morton is really angry, he writes directly to the point. In such sentences as the following there is wonderfully little of the prevailing languor of prose style: If I had not believed upon sufficient evidence that the succession of Bishops in the Church of England had been legally derived from the Apostles, I had never entered into that high calling, much less continued in it thus long. And therefore I must here expressly vindicate myself from a most notorious untruth which is cast upon me by a late Romish writer, that I should, publicly, in the House of Peers, the beginning of the last Parliament, assent to that abominable fiction which some Romanists have devised concerning the consecrating Matthew Parker at the Nag's Head Tavern to be Archbishop of Canterbury. For I do here solemnly profess I have always believed that fable to proceed from the Father of Lies, as the public records still extant do evidently testify. Nor do I remember that ever I heard it mentioned in that or in any other parliament that ever I sate in. As for our brethren, the Protestants of foreign reformed churches, the most learned and judicious of themselves have bewailed their misery for want of Bishops. And therefore God forbid I should be so uncharitable as to censure them for no-churches, for that which is their infelicity, not their fault. But as for our perverse Protestants at home, I cannot say the same of them, seeing they impiously reject that which the others piously desire. Thomas Morton (1564-1659) was the son of a mercer at York, where he was born on March 20, 1564. He was sent to St. John's College, Cambridge, where John Donne he was carefully trained in theology under the Puritan divine, William Whitaker (1548-1595). Morton, however, abandoned the Calvinist section of the Church, becoming more and more strongly opposed to dissent. His literary career began rather late, his earliest work, the Apologia Catholica, being published in 1605, but Morton was immediately drawn into controversy, and his writings were extremely numerous. The most effective of them was The Catholic Appeal of 1609, which was extremely popular and was considered to be "a final and deadly blow to Rome." Morton was successively Bishop of Chester, Lichfield, and Durham, and suffered greatly at the overthrow of episcopacy; surviving, however, until his ninety-sixth year. He died at Easton-Mauduit on September 22, 1659. George Hakewill (1578-1649) is little known, but continues to have a few ardent admirers. LES REUERENDIS SUIRL JOHANNI He was rector of Heanton Punchardon One of those learned young men whom poris hæc Anime fit Sindon Syndon Jesus for his controversial writings against Portrait of Donne in his winding-sheet From "Death's Duel," 1630 the Romanists was one who had himself been brought up in the Roman Church, the poet JOHN DONNE (p. 292). He now attracts our attention as incomparably the greatest religious orator of the age, the finest theological writer between Hooker and Jeremy Taylor, and perhaps the most ornate and stately composer of English prose in the Jacobean period. He is at the head of the divines who with more or less ingenuity and fervour were pouring forth from their pulpits those strange disquieting sermons which at once disturbed and overawed their audiences. The qualities which mark the astonishing poems of Donne, their occasional majesty, their tossing and foaming imagination, their lapses into bad taste and unintelligibility, the sinister impression of a strange perversity of passion carefully suppressed in them, all these, though to a less marked degree, distinguish the prose of Donne. Its beauties are of the savage order, and they display not only no consciousness of any rules which govern prose composition, but none of that chastening of rhetoric which had been achieved under Elizabeth by Hooker. Such books of Donne's as his paradox of suicide, the Biathanatos, and his fantastic romance, a diatribe against the Jesuits, called Ignatius his Conclave, unquestionably exhibit sympathy with what was morbid in the temper of the time. They are to theology what the tragedies of Ford are to drama. But when we turn to the Sermons of Donne we rise to a much higher plane. Walton, who heard many of these discourses delivered, has left us a wonderful description of their author in the majesty of his prestige at St. Paul's: Preaching the Word so as showed his own heart was possessed with those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distil into others: a preacher in earnest ; weeping sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself, like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives: here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practised it, and a virtue so as to make it beloved even by those that loved it not; and all this with a most particular grace and an inexpressible addition of comeliness. Ene minge. So that you may at gut fir by There is a doubt as to the degree in which these magnificent sermons were orally delivered. The preacher certainly held no manuscript before him, while yet he effort of retaining in the memory such a rich coil of interminably complicated sentences is hardly credible. It seems probable that the sermon was carefully composed and written, as we now possess it, but that the preacher merely spoke a discourse on the same lines which he kept as close to his original as he could. His rule was to preach for exactly sixty minutes; he had "his |